pt. 1. Rousseau and Wordsworth: autobiography and the language of feeling The story of a life -- Rousseau and the vocabulary of feeling -- "Love" in The prelude -- pt. 2. Rousseau and Wordsworth: imagination and memory The sources of imagination Rousseau Wordsworth -- The charm of memory -- The sentiment of being -- pt. 3. English vision and French symbols Victor Hugo and Wordsworthian perception -- Victor Hugo: from spectacle to symbol -- The lovely behavior of things: Hopkins and Baudelaire -- pt. 4. Ideas of the symbol in Coleridge and Baudelaire Beauty and taste -- Symbolic light -- The language of nature -- pt. 5. Nature and imagination in Middlemarch and Madame Bovary Middlemarch: beyond the voyage to Cythera -- The poverty of nature in Madame Bovary